Kindle Scout day 10 update – social networking

RAOUTwitterIt’s day ten in the Kindle Scout house and things got a little bit crazy when I realised that I would have to move out of my comfort zone. The first week was a ‘getting to know you’ experience where, for most of the week, I languished in ‘hot and trending’.

I uploaded my novel on a Thursday, so for the first weekend it was visible on the front page of Kindle Scout and both new and hot, and my friends were responding to my pleas to nominate. As my novel disappeared from the front page it disappeared from hot and trending. Additionally, other authors with new campaigns and last day campaigns became visible.

This made me think about my marketing. I’ve never been shy, but asking for nominations was difficult. It was also a wonderful experience as many of my friends backed the campaign and shared my posts. I really thought about how I could reach people and investigated and subsequebtly learned how to use the following:

Hootsuite
Facebook Ads
Thunderclap
Personal messages to friends who I though could help
Designing a dedicated branding banner for all social networks

The problem was that it made me feel bad. Why would people want to nominate my novel? Was the offer of a free copy if I was published by Kindle Press enough? It was driving mad ( and still is a bit now!) Marketing for Kindle Scout is full out campaigning, with no opportunity left untaken, including approaching strangers.

All these things worked to an extent by raising page views. The nominations system is still a complex mystery, being partly dependent on other people’s nominations as well as your own and the timing of campaign starts and ends. Even so, Random Acts of Unkindness entered ‘hot and trending’ for 10 hours on day 9.

I started to explore what other Kindle Scout authors were doing to market their campaign, and found out that many of them had extensive back catalogues and others were dedicating every waking minute to it by tweeting all the time and producing podcasts. I’ve also read blogs of those authors who have been successful on Kindle Scout, trying to glean information on their techniques.

It’s what i suspected. Network for all you are worth in case nominations and page views do count and remember that the final decision rests with the Amazon editors. My traffic stats are pretty stable, with 45% still coming from Kindle Scout pages, and 55% from my own social networking. Page views at 542 and 72/240 hours hot and trending.

I’ve learnt a lot this week. I keep reminding myself that nominations are not the only reason Amazon chooses a novel for publication, but it must help. Almost two weeks in and I’m constantly looking for ways to publicise my campaign and being overwhelmed by the generosity of the friends I’ve asked to share my message so a big THANK YOU!

If you haven’t nominated Random Acts of Unkindness I’d be very grateful if you did. You can do that here

More updates at day 15 – half way through my Kindle Scout adventure!